Comic Cuts - 4 June 2010

Another week spent mostly turfing through boxes and throwing things away. About 30 bags, two-thirds of which were paper, so far, approximately two crates and three shelves worth of rubbish out of the house. Most of the magazines were copies of Model & Collectors Mart that I edited between 1995 and 2000, although I kept writing for the magazine until it folded in 2008 and had written a number of articles for the previous editor since 1993. Fifteen years' worth of magazines adds up to a hell of a weight, so I spent a couple of hours every evening snipping out all of my articles and reduced two crates-worth down to two-thirds of a magazine box. Much easier to handle!
I've raised £65 from selling off books so far, although that's only a few percent of what it's going to cost us to move. We're hoping to get down to a boot fair in a couple of weekends time to see if I can offload a pile of books (mostly tat, even I have to admit) and old film mags, which I've yet to sort out. I've also a pile of back issues of Fortean Times that need sorting through, Locus (the SF newspaper) and various others that I'll probably (reluctantly) let go. This will be the second time I've culled my Locus collection, having been a regular buyer since about 1982. I also used to get SF Chronicle but those were dumped a few years ago. I might also let go of my somewhat patchy run of Interzone as I can't actually recall the last time I looked at them. They're in a box, somewhere.

I managed to scan another bag of artwork, this one the complete set of Black Bartlemy's Treasure drawn by Jesus Blasco - you can see an example at the top of this column. Not sure when we'll get to use it, and the whole thing needs to be re-lettered, but the raw scans are done. I've also been scanning a few covers from foreign editions of strips which I'll be running on Bear Alley at some point.

I'll end with a random scan from the clippings file. When The Trigan Empire was reprinted in Holland and Germany, some of the books carried a map of the planet Elekton, drawn by Dutch artist Nico van Dam. It's unlikely to have been seen by many fans over here... so I thought I'd put it on the scanner while I still have the books. No doubt I'll be stumbling across more weird and wonderful junk over the next few weeks. Anything good will probably turn up here...

(* Black Bartlemy's Treasure art by Jesus Blasco © Look and Learn Ltd.; Trigan Empire © IPC Media.)